First Timber Sale of the Year

01-13-03

I just found this on the CFA's website:

Friday, January 17th Cub, Batwings (Oak Grove sale!), and Decoy Resell timber sale auctions. 11386 ccf timber, and 360 acres of forest to be sold to the highest bidder. Come out to stop the first Mt. Hood auction of the new year. 8 am at Mt. Hood Forest Service Headquarters, 16400 Champion Way, Sandy OR.

I'll be there taking notes and pictures. Check back for a report. I should have it up by the 20'th.

Monday, Jan 20
Well, I went to Sandy, the cops were there, police tape surrounded the building (the public is not allowed into the sale, only the bidders because of the tree hugger presence at timber sales.), they had people with a videocam on the roof .... but no tree huggers showed up. I was able to talk to some fs personell and got some background info on timber sales. The first fs employee I talked to said that the tree huggers usually show up, sing some songs, do some dances, sometimes get violent and generally just try to disrupt things. One would think that if they had valid reasons for trying to stop the timber sales that they would do more than just sing and dance. Maybe they would present some facts? Nah, cuz they have no facts to back up their protests.
He then went back in and sent out another fs rep who gave me some background info on the sales. Combining my conversation with her and the hard copies she gave me, I found that forest timber sales are highly regulated. Before the sale is announced studies are done. Studies that include threatened and endangered species, habitat, and reclamation. All bidders must first post a bond equal to the total cost of the sale, including road construction, deconstruction and reclamation costs. They are required to log the area in a manner specified in the bid eg: helicopter loggging, skyline logging etc. Only certain types of trees may be logged and clear cutting is almost never allowed.

I will try to contact the fs and the cfa to find out the results of the sale and why the tree huggers never showed up and their reaction to the sale.

1-27-03
From the CFA - They don't know why nobody showed up to protest, bt assured me that there would be protesters at the Feb. 7th sale.
From the FS - There were no bidders on the Batwing And Decoy sales, 3 bidders on the Cub sale and it was sold for just under a half-million $.